The global spread of Oriental Horses in the past 1,500 years through the lens of the Y chromosome Text journal article Lara Radovic Viktoria Remer Doris Rigler Elif Bozlak Lucy Allen Gottfried Brem Monika Reissman Gudrun A. Brockmann Katarzyna Ropka-Molik Monika Stefaniuk-Szmukier Liliya Kalinkova Valery V. Kalashnikov Alexander M. Zaitev Terje Raudsepp Caitlin Castaneda Ines von Butler-Wemken Laura Patterson Rosa Samantha A. Brooks Miguel Novoa-Bravo Nikos Kostaras Abdugani Abdurasulov Douglas F. Antczak Donald C. Miller Maria Susana Lopes Artur da Câmara Machado Gabriella Lindgren Rytis Juras Gus Cothran Barbara Wallner Horses Genetics Animals Y Chromosome Genetics Male Haplotypes Genetics Breeding Domestication Phylogeny application/pdf eng Text Wissenschaftlicher Artikel National Academy of Sciences http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Since their domestication, horses have accompanied mankind, and humans have constantly shaped horses according to their needs through stallion-centered breeding. Consequently, the male-specific portion of the Y chromosome (MSY) is extremely uniform in modern horse breeds. The majority of stallions worldwide carry MSY haplotypes (HT) attributed to an only ~1,500-y-old, so-called, "Crown" haplogroup. The predominance of the Crown in modern horse breeds is thought to represent a footprint of the vast impact of stallions of "Oriental origin" in the past millennium. Here, we report the results of a fine-scaled MSY haplotyping of large datasets of patrilines comprising 1,517 males of 189 modern horse breeds, covering a broad phenotypic and geographic spectrum. We can disentangle the multilayered influence of Oriental stallions over the last few hundred years, exposing the intense linebreeding and the wide-ranging impact of Arabian, English Thoroughbred, and Coldblood sires. Iberian and New World horse breeds contain a wide range of diversified Crown lineages. Their broad HT spectrum illustrates the spread of horses of Oriental origin via the Iberian Peninsula after the Middle Ages, which is commonly referred to as the "Spanish influence." Our survey also revealed a second major historical dissemination of horses from Western Asia, attributed to the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. Our analysis shows that MSY analysis can uncover the complex history of horse breeds and can be used to establish the paternal ancestry of modern horse breeds. 2024 Proceedings of the National Academy of sciences of the United States of America Copyright © 2024 the Author(s) open access doi:10.1073/pnas.2414408121 https://phaidra.vetmeduni.ac.at/o:3832